ABSTRACT
The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land consider that they live in ‘two worlds’, encapsulated but not colonized by the Australian settler state. This study of courtroom interactions in the Blue Mud Bay native title case reveals, first, how the Australian legal system enacts the sovereignty of the state over those to whom some form of restitution is being offered under native title law. It then discusses how Yolngu witnesses inserted a discourse about sovereignty into the proceedings through an insistence on the incommensurability of rom (their ‘laws and customs’) and native title law, and through carefully positioned enactments of rom.
